Peter Green

The Third Round in Poland

At first sight, the victorious Polish workers strike against price increases inJune 1976 was a dazzling example of Marxs observation about historicalrepetitions: the first time, on the Baltic in 1970, as tragedy; and now a farcicalre-run of Gomulkas attempt to cut living standards by raising prices.* The sameissue, the same working-class response, and the same climb-down by the rgime.The only difference seemed to be the hectic pace of the spectacle the second timeround, with the Prime Minister reappearing on TV within the space of twenty-fourhours to directly contradict his earlier sober announcement in even more solemntones. Otherwise, the reader of the Western press might think, nothing in Polandhas changed. Economics and politics have remained fixed in the same mould as atthe time Gomulka made his hurried exit. This impression can be easily reinforcedby the knowledge that Poland, with a population almost as large as that of EastGermany, Czechoslovakia and Hungary put together and with the second largestCommunist Party in the Soviet bloc, differs in a number of important respectsfrom other East European countries. The wave of Stalinist terror that swept69

the Communist Parties of the Soviet buffer zone at the end of the 1940stouched the Polish United Workers Party (PUWP) less than almost anyotherits leading Titoist, Gomulka, was not even put on trial,much less executed. Above all, in October 1956 a sweeping massmovement that brought Gomulka to power in the face of bitter Soviethostility resulted in a number of changes that subsequently markedPoland off from its neighbours: most importantly, an agriculture stilloverwhelmingly in the hands of private peasant proprietors; a stronglyentrenched Catholic Church; the only genuinely independent group ofParliamentary deputies in Eastern Europethe Catholic Znak group inthe Sejm; and an intelligentsia with considerably more freedom ofexpression than is the norm in the rest of Eastern Europe. All theseundoubted peculiarities of contemporary Poland can lead the casualobserver to believe not only that little has changed in the domesticconfiguration of forces, but also that Polish politics is a law unto itself.Unusual events can happen in Poland that could never be tolerated inother East European states, and ipso facto the recent upheavals in thesummer of 1976 have no general significance for East European politicsas a whole.The aim of this article is not to deny either the connections with 197071or the important peculiarities of Polish society and politics. But itattempts to show the way in which the largely misunderstood crisis in thewinter of 197071 produced a political dynamic whose contradictions areboth specific to the 1970s and highly characteristic of the problemsbesetting other East European rgimes in the second half of this decade.Furthermore, the interlocking of these essentially internationalcontradictions of the bureaucratic rgimes in Eastern Europe with thepeculiarities of Polish society has produced a highly explosiveconjuncture in Poland and one that will increasingly demand theattention of the revolutionary left throughout Europe.

Poland during the Baltic Crisis of 197071

The events of June 1976 were not a re-run of the strike movement at theend of 1970. But the political relationship of forces within which theGierek leadership has had to operate right up to the present was shaped ina profound and concrete way by the working-class offensive which beganon the Baltic coast in December 1970. For this movement was a good dealmore than a sudden elemental explosion replacing one face at the top ofthe bureaucratic pyramid with another. A number of features of theworkers movement in what we might call, for the sake of brevity, theBaltic crisis need to be stressed.The Working-class Offensive

First, there was the extraordinary scope and dynamism of the working*This article is taken from a much longer work on the political crisis in Poland, due toappear as an NLB book later this year. This extract omits all but passing references to suchcrucial elements in the evolving configuration of forces as the Polish peasantry, the intelligentsia, the church and the Soviet leadership. The article as it stands is thus inevitably onesided in its concentration upon the relationship between the Party leadership and the working class. Nevertheless, this relationship remains in my view the central, determining element in the Polish crisis, and thus justifies the selection of material for the space available.70

class upsurge. On 12 December, a Saturday, the Council of Ministers

announced increases in food prices averaging about 30 per cent. Thefollowing Monday morning, 3,000 workers held a mass meeting at theLenin Shipyard in Gdansk on the Baltic.1 When union officials refused totake any action against the price increases, the workers struck and marched to the local radio station to try to broadcast an appeal to the localpopulation. Blocked by the militia, the crowd of shipyard workersmarched on the citys Party headquarters shouting Bread and The pressis lying. The police attacked and the crowd attempted to burn down thebuilding. The next day Gdansk was in the throes of a popular uprisingand the strike movement spread to Gdynia and Elblag, where the massesalso stoned the Party headquarters. The workers of Szczecin also struck,and on Wednesday the 16th strikes swept through the Katowice area inUpper Silesia and work also stopped in Poznan. The movement was nolonger confined to the Baltic. On the 17th there was a massacre of workersin Gdynia and further deaths of workers in Slupsk. At this point a fullscale working-class mobilization in Szczecin took the leadership of themovement, under the direction of the strike committee at the AdolfWarski shipyards. By the evening of Thursday the 17th tanks wereentering the main Baltic ports, while the movement of strikes anddemonstrations spread to Wroclaw and Cracow. Every town in the Balticregion, including Starograd and Malbork, was on strike. On Friday the18th many of the large factories in Warsaw, including the famous Zerancar plant that had led the workers movement in 1956, downed tools. Theleaders of the strike committees in Warsaw proclaimed a general strike forMonday 21 December.2 At this point, over the weekend of 1920December, the Central Committee met and removed the already sickGomulka, declaring Edward Gierek the new leader of the Party.But this did not end the movement; it was only the beginning. Gierekannounced a whole series of economic concessions in the Sejm on 23December: a promise not to raise prices further during the next twoyears, a new bonus scheme, seven billion zloty worth of allowances forlow-income workers, a crash housing programme, etc.3 These did notend the movement. The strike committees remained in operation andorganized repeated strikes on the Baltic to press for sweeping politicalchanges. On 24 January, in the midst of an occupation-strike by theSzczecin shipyard workers and continuing strikes in other parts of thecity, Party Secretary Gierek and Prime Minister Jaroszewicz arrived todiscuss with a mass meeting of strikers for nine continuous hours.4 Byoffering further concessions, Gierek was able to end the Szczecin strikes.But this did not stop the movement. The strike committees in Szczecinand Gdansk were transformed into workers committees, whichcontinued to hold sway as the workers elected leaders in the shipyards.1Glos Wybrzeza, 28 December 1970; see the French translation of this local daily paper inEst et Ouest, 1628 February 1971.2The most detailed account of the strike movement is in Paul Barton, Misre et Rvolte delOuvrier Polonais, Paris 1971. For an important analysis of the crisis, see Pologne: le Crpusculedes Bureaucrates, Cahiers Rouges, Nouvelle Srie Internationale No. 3, Paris 1971.3Trybuna Ludu (the Party daily), 247 December 1970.4See the translation of excerpts from that extraordinary nine-hour meeting in NLR 72,MarchApril 1972. A full version of the tapes smuggled out of Poland was published inRewolta Szczecinska i jej znaczenie, Paris 1971.

71

They maintained their authority also over the working class in thesurrounding areas, holding a large number of mass meetings in factoriesthroughout the Baltic region, and supervising new trade-union electionsin the shipyards. The rgime had frozen prices, but at the rate fixed byGomulka in December and not at the pre-December levels. In addition,the working class was raising a series of political demands for trade-unionand press independence, as well as a mass of economic and socialgrievances. Gierek had declared that it was utterly impossible to return tothe old price levels of 1966 but the movement was not receding. Gierektried to defuse the ferment in Gdansk by holding a further meeting withthe workers there, but still the workers organized and pressed theirdemands. Strikes were continuing in other parts of the country, notablyat the large tractor factory at Ursus near Warsaw, where Party leaderstried in vain to persuade a meeting of strikers delegates to return towork.5Then on 11 February over 10,000 mainly women workers at seven textilefactories in Lodz struck, and by the next day Polands second largestindustrial city was gripped by a mass strike. Gierek pleaded for trust andpatience but without effect. On the evening of 14 February, PrimeMinister Jaroszewicz arrived in Lodz together with three other Politburomembers to meet the strikers. After a farcical incident wherebyJaroszewicz discovered that the enthusiastic mass meeting he wasaddressing in the citys main theatre was packed with Party functionariesposing as strikers, the Prime Minister was eventually taken to a meetingof delegates from the occupation strikes at the Marchlewski works andremained discussing with the workers throughout the night. The nextmorning Jaroszewicz left the factory empty-handed: the Lodz workershad refused to budge from their basic demands, especially that calling fora return to 1966 price levels. In the meantime, Gierek had hurriedly met the Soviet leaders and on 15 February Warsaw Radioannounced that, thanks to a Soviet loan of 100 million dollars in hardcurrency, the Party leadership had decided to impose a two-year pricefreeze at 1966 levels. The Party had capitulated to the Lodz workers whilethe strike was in full swing and after the failure of negotiations. Even thenthe Lodz strike did not end until two further days had elapsed.6And even then, the movement did not end. A regional conference ofworkers delegates had met in Szczecin on 15 February; after discussionslasting twenty-six hours, the conference proposed to create a new tradeunion federation, since the existing one had no real links with theworkers. At the Central Committee Plenum in the middle of April,Politburo member Edward Babiuch referred to the continuing strikesand protest movements in the country.7 The new trade-union federationdid not come into being, but the workers committees which hademerged out of strike committees were still active in April when some ofthem were reported to have voluntarily disbanded. Others continuedthroughout the year and one report in the autumn of 1972 stated that theworkers committee in Szczecin remained a major influence in the city.85

Barton, op. cit. p. 150.

On 17 February, Warsaw Radio announced that the Lodz strike was ending.7 Trybuna Ludu, 18 April 1971.8 Neal Ascherson in The Observer, 24 September 1972.6

72

In short, the so-called Baltic strikes against Gomulka in 1970 took placemainly in 1971, were not at all confined to the Baltic, and were notconfined to strike forms of organization. Most importantly, from thepoint of view of this analysis, they were primarily fought not against Gomulkaat all, but against Gierek.The second crucial feature of the Baltic upsurge was the following, whichmust already be evident from the outline of the movements dynamism:the thrust of the movement was not simply prices at all. A movement thrown uppurely for economic demands could not have sustained itself in this way.The global political character of the mass movement was indicated by therepeated occurrence of violent assaults on Party headquarters, in one cityafter another, and by the lists of demands drawn up by the best organizedsections of the movement.9 Great prominence was given to the strugglefor basic democratic political rights: immediate free elections for the socalled workers councils and trade unions; complete independence fromthe Party for the trade unions; an end to censorship and press lies;demands for the trials of those responsible for the killing of more than ahundred workers in the Baltic ports during December, and demands forthe dismantling of the repressive forcesthese were absolutely centralconcerns of the workers in the Baltic upsurge. Such a programmepresents a potentially deadly menace to the bureaucratic rgimes inEastern Europe, whoever raises it.A Watershed in Political Consciousness

Another important sign of the political maturity of the movement was thefact that it very quickly moved from elemental, spontaneous beginningsto the creation of stable, authoritative organizations of struggle withleaderships capable of spreading the movement and articulating itsdemands. This leads on to a third, more general feature of the workersupsurge: it marked an important stage in the historical development ofthe Polish working class. The Polish workers movement has a longrevolutionary tradition, with few rivals in other countries. The history ofthe Russian revolutionary movement has become the common propertyof the international labour movement. What is less well known is the factthat a full year before Bloody Sunday of January 1905, the working classin Warsaw was demonstrating against the Russo-Japanese war,triggering numerous strikes throughout the Polish territories of theRussian Empire. In early 1905, a successful general strike was organizedin all of Russian Poland, in solidarity with the workers of StPetersburg. In June 1905, the workers of Lodz held the city during threedays of street fighting.10 In support of the Moscow uprising in December,the workers of Lodz, Sosnowiec and Radom demonstrated in the teeth offierce repression. Again, the revolutionary crisis of autumn 1923 in9

The programmes of demands available in the West are: the first set of demands of theSzczecin strike committee, numbering twenty-two, in Barton, op. cit. pp. 1334; theGdansk set, also in Barton, pp. 1445; and the second set of Szczecin demands, in NLR 72.10Much of the information here is drawn from M. K. Dziewanowski, The Communist Party ofPoland, Cambridge Mass. 1959the standard bourgeois history of the Polish Party. See alsoIsaac Deutschers assessment of Polish Communism between the wars, The Tragedy of thePolish Communist Party in Tamara Deutscher (ed.), Marxism in Our Time, London 1972.Deutscher described the organization in this period as a great and heroic party.73

Germany is a familiar part of European working-class history; but less

well known is the Polish general strike in November of that year, duringwhich the workers of Cracow took over the city, disarmed a battalion ofinfantry and defeated a cavalry attack, and voluntarily handed the cityback to the Polish bourgeoisie only through the persuasion of theleadership of the Polish Socialist Party. The great sit-in strikes in theUnited States during the 1930s are another familiar part of working-classhistory. What tends to be forgotten is the fact that the tactic of factoryoccupations was at first called the Polish strike after its originators, thePolish textile workers, who used it to great effect in 1931. In 1936 no lessthan 85 per cent of the entire work-force in large and medium-sizedPolish industry was on strike at one time or another.But between the Lodz general strike against the Tsarist autocracy and theLodz general strike against Gierek seventy years later, the class consciouscore of the Polish working class has repeatedly identified its socialistaspirations with political leaders who have led the class into a blind alley.Before the war, it followed the Polish Socialist Party to a series of defeats,while the minority supporting the pre-war Communist Party witnessedits complete destruction by Stalin in 1938 as a nest of Trotskyists. Afterthe war, at the time of the merger of the new CP and the rump of the PPS, asizeable part of the working class supported the new rgime only to findits hopes trampled on during the Stalinization drive at the beginning ofthe 1950s. In 1956, the workers placed their trust in that wing of thePartysymbolized by Gomulkathat had suffered repression at thehands of Stalins agents. Now fifteen years of Gomulka had convinced thecore sections of the working class that some alternative had to be found toplacing hopes in one grouping or another of the Party leadership. In thissense, 197071 marked a real historical turning-point: the firstbeginnings of a search for a new line of advance among the classconscious elements within the Polish working class. It was this newattitude which armed the leaders of the strike movement against blindfaith in the promises of Gierek, and indeed prepared them to handle thenew leaderships actions as political manoeuvres.The full significance of this change in consciousness amongst theadvanced layers of the Polish workers can only be understood against thebackground of the enormous growth in the numerical strength and socialweight of the working class since the Second World War. In 1938 urbanworkers made up less than 10 per cent of the total economically activepopulation. A rough outline of the social structure of Poland on 31December 1970 is given in Table 1, and shows the preponderance ofmanual workers in the country.TABLE 1Polish social structure 1970

Alexander Matejko; Social Change and Stratification in Eastern Europe, New York

The sustained working-class offensive of 197071 has no parallel in the

post-war history of Eastern Europe. Gierek himself acknowledged that itbrought the country to the verge of civil war.11 And equallyunprecedentedly, the Polish working class of 197071 was not defeated.The sequel to October 1956 had been the defeat of the Lodz transportworkers strike in 1957. The sequel to December 1970 was the victory ofthe Lodz workers in February 1971. And in spite of subsequentrepression of strike leaders, the rgime never attempted to confront anddefeat the working class in front of the Polish nation in open struggle.After Gomulkas attempt to crush the movement by force, the new Partyleadership was forced to resort to desperate manoeuvres in order tosurvive and regain the initiative. The entire population of Polandwatched this humiliating spectacle over a period of months, as Gierek andJaroszewicz attempted to gain political authority by negotiating withstriking workers in Szczecin, Gdansk and Lodz, workers who had foughton the streets against the police and the army and who had been brandedas criminal, hooligan elements throughout the Polish press in December.Both on the Baltic and in Lodz the working-class members of the PUWPhad been drawn into this deadly contest on the side of their fellowworkers, some even playing a prominent role: seven out of the thirtyeight members of the Szczecin strike committee were erstwhile Partymembers and the Gdansk strike committee appears to have contained aslightly larger number.12 The rebuilding of the political rgime and theentire orientation of the Party leadership had to be worked out anew fromscratch. As the Politburos report to the February Central Committeemeeting stated: events have shown that any disruption of the bondbetween the Party and the working class . . . can cause a serious politicalupheaval in our country. It added that the Party must always in thefuture aim at preventing any conflicts with the working class.A glimpse of the chaos in some of the local organizations of the PUWP wasgiven by the district Party Secretary of Malbork, who wrote during thecrisis that there is no unity in the Partys activities. Some of the comradeslost their heads, they started to attack the Party.13 Rgimes like that inPoland derive their political legitimacy from a claim to represent parexcellence the interests of the industrial working class, and in line with thisclaim the leaders of the Communist Parties in Eastern Europe have tocontinually strive to demonstrate proletarian links, not only by excludingall other socialist political formations from political life, but also by beingable to demonstrate support, however passive, in the form of genuineworking-class membership of the monopolistic Communist Party. Theelement of political repression through the militia, the army and thepolitical police is vital to these bureaucratic rgimes. But it is not enough,particularly in a crisis of the sort that occurred in 197071 when armedconfrontation proved counter-productive and the rgime could surviveonly by means of political manoeuvre and the establishing of politicalalliances of some sort with different sectors of society. And if we look atthe social composition of the PUWP on the eve of the Baltic crisis, we findthat, at least according to official figures, no less than 40 per cent of total11

In a speech to a meeting of newspaper editors published in Prasa Polska, November 1971.

See Barton, op. cit. p. 146.13Polityka, 13 February 1971.12

75

Party membership consisted of manual workers.14 By the end of the 1960s

this meant that 13 per cent of the total number of manual workers inPoland were Party members: at the time of the Baltic uprising one Polishworker in every ten was a member of the ruling party. And during thecrisis itself, with the partial exception of upper Silesia, Giereks owncarefully nurtured industrial fiefdom and centre of the coal-miningindustry, with wages well above the national average and with a morelimited strike-wave, the Polish working class had en masse deserted theParty in an active and unmistakable way.In such circumstances, study of the Baltic crisis obliges us to recognizenot only the unparalleled force of the working-class offensive, but alsoanother no less remarkable fact: the way in which the new leadership wasable to survive the crisis intact and even bring a semblance of order intopolitical life by the Spring of 1971.TABLE

B. Lazitch, Les Partis Communistes DEurope; Hans Roos, A History of Modern

Giereks StrategyDuring his early period in office, Gierek was subjected to a good deal of14

The stable figure of 40 per cent for working-class membership during the sixties does notat all mean that the actual worker members during the decade were relatively stable in composition. During the period from 1959 to 1970, about 450,000 workers were expelled fromthe Party; in other words, the 800,000 or so working-class Party members in 1970 were arather fluid quantity, much more fluid than other social groups in the Party. This factbecomes all the more important when we remember the fact that the criteria for workersrecruitment to the Party were considerably lower than the criteria for members of othersocial groups. Almost any worker could join at will, and a workers Party card would beremoved only for serious misdemeanours, involving criminal or immoral activities,drunkenness or grave disciplinary offences. It should also be remembered that officialParty figures for working-class membership are not fully reliable. Various categories ofemployee with supervisory functions or privileged positions in the work-place would beincluded as workers, and the continuous pressure from central authorities on local Partysecretaries to demonstrate a high proletarian composition, as a sign of local Partyauthority, encouraged looseness and exaggeration in membership returns. When it is alsoremembered that Party membership could provide real if limited benefits for the workersinvolved and their families, the figures for working-class Party membership are in fact agood deal less impressive than the bald statistic of 40 per cent might suggest. It did notmean that the Party commanded a high degree of political support within the working class.Nevertheless, the fact remains that the link with the working class is a consideration ofreal political importance for such rgimes.

76

criticism from some of his colleagues in other East European capitals,

notably from the embattled Husak rgime across the border inCzechoslovakia.15 But once the initial decision had been taken to avoid ahead-on confrontation with the working class and any possible need forWarsaw Pact troops, there had been no other option but to rely on thecapacity of Gierek to contain the working-class movement and divert itfrom objectively revolutionary demands by offering massive economicconcessions. The Soviet leadership had backed Gierek all the way on thiscourse, even though it created a configuration of forces in the countrywhich severely limited Giereks medium-term strategic options. In thefirst place, the working-class movement had not been defeated: indeed,Gierek had been forced to come to terms with the strike committees anddirectly lean on them to derive the necessary political authority for hisleadership. In the second place, Gierek had been required to offer majoreconomic hostages to the workers: accepting the initial basic claim of themass of workers to freeze prices at 1966 levels for two years, he had alsopromised an uninterrupted rise in working-class living standards. In fact,the Party leadership appealed repeatedly to the masses to judge its futureperformance on this criterion. Its message to the working class was:accept consumer goods as a surrogate for proletarian democracy.Industry and Agriculture

Any sharp and sustained rise in workers living standards would be

something new for the Polish economy. In February 1971, the Politburoadmitted: It must be stated quite clearly that during the years 196670,Poland had the lowest rate of increase in real wages of all the countries ofComecon . . . There were some groups of workers which actually suffereda decline in their real wages.16 Furthermore, the economic situation wascritical. The two key fronts of the economic battle were an industrialsystem whose institutional arrangements were producing economicchaos; and a private agriculture under-capitalized and gravely hamperedby the proliferation of tiny, uneconomic peasant plots.17 On both fronts,moreover, the new leadership faced long-standing policy debates, bothsides of which offered options which appeared impracticable in theconditions of 1971.On the industrial front, the traditional commandist model of planninghad been maintained in Poland throughout the 1960s; by 1970 it hadbrought the Polish economy to the brink of disaster. Mountains ofunwanted and unsaleable goods were moving from factory to warehouseat twice the rate of retail sales by the end of the sixties. In the second halfof 1970, total inventories had reached the gigantic figure of 500,000million zlotyhalf Polands estimated gross national product for theyear !18 The formula of economic growth through commandist planning15A bourgeois press source quoted in Intercontinental Press, 16 October 1972, states:Persistent reports in Warsaw suggest that the Czechoslovak Communist Party has beenraising more criticisms of developments in Poland, most recently at a meeting of Partyleaders in the Crimea.16Trybuna Ludu, 15 February 1971.17By 1970, 30 per cent of all peasant farms comprised less than 3 hectares of land, a pattern ofland-tenure wasteful of agricultural resources since such holdings could not sustain modernmechanized methods of farming.18M. Kowalewski, Trybuna Ludu 13 May 1971.

77

in a closed economy had to be abandoned. Yet the workers upsurge

which catapulted Gierek to power had simultaneously shot down thelong-standing alternative of an institutional economic reform which theGierek faction had itself been arguing for in the late sixties. Indeed, thesupreme irony was that poor Gomulka, who had equivocated for so longover the implementation of a thoroughgoing technocratic economicreform, triggered the movement which brought him down in December1970 by finally trying to push through just such a reform project. AndGierek had come into power on a wave of opposition to his own factionsprevious economic strategy! He had urgently to seek a third road on theindustrial front.19The traditional alternatives for agriculture were equally barren: toattempt any solution to the agricultural crisis by means of a politicalcampaign to collectivize the small peasant plots would immediatelyarouse the fury of the entire peasantry and promote a confrontation withthe Church, without boosting agricultural production at all in the shortrun. On the contrary, it would raise the spectre of a peasant strike and afood crisis in the cities. But to continue along Gomulkas path ofmaintaining the present tenure arrangements indefinitely, while using aheavy state procurement system to try to squeeze growing quantities offood out of agriculture, would merely perpetuate the existing stagnation.On both fronts the new leaderships solutions were ingenious. Giereksadvisers were imaginative and bold enough to realize the potential valueof the moves towards international dtente for rejuvenating Polishindustry without making any sharp choice between different domesticplanning mechanisms. In any case, comprehensive domestic schemes likethe Hungarian New Economic Mechanism were suspect in Moscow,while Brezhnevs drive for Western credits and an expansion of EastWest trade was being hailed as the latest example of the Sovietleaderships creative application of Marxism-Leninism to modernconditions. The first plank of Giereks economic strategy was to seize onthis Soviet precedent and emulate the Soviet example with an enthusiasmunmatched in Eastern Europe. Building on the friendship treaty whichGomulka, just before his political demise, had concluded with Brandt,Gierek turned to the capitalist West in search of massive loans. Thesewere to produce a foreign-credit-led investment boom in the Polisheconomy. The credits would be used to import a new set of means ofproduction for large sectors of Polish industry; the latter would in turn beable to use the new modern equipment to export to the capitalist world,pay back the old credits and lay the basis for new ones, thus generatingsustained economic growth. In the meantime, reforms of domesticinstitutions would at first be small and then gradual, mainly geared to themost dynamic and export-oriented sectors of the Polish economy. Moreimportant would be an effort to use the increases in real wages achievedby Polish workers to step up productivity agreements and increasingly tie19

It is true that Gierek had objected to some aspects of Gomulkas economic planit hadbeen piloted by an old factional opponent of hisbut the general economic strategy waspushed for by Gierek himself throughout the late sixties. See Michael Gamarnikow,Poland: Political Pluralism in a One-Party State, Problems of Communism, JulyAugust1967, on the Gierek factions positions in the late sixties.

78

future wage increases to further productivity deals, piece-work,

measured-day-work and bonus schemes. While taking a leaf out ofBrezhnevs book in the field of grand strategy, Gierek planned to operateat the micro level with the aid of business management hand-booksfashionable in the West in the late 1960s, using generous, once-off wageincreases as a bribe for higher productivity. In this neat way Gierek hopedto raise living standards without either attacking the workers directly oroffending the Soviet leadership.In agriculture, the new leaderships strategy was equally imaginative.Gierek was not frightened to abolish Gomulkas shibboleth of allegedlyLeninist orthodoxycompulsory state purchases for the bulk of thepeasants produce. He was also prepared to offer generous economicincentives to the private peasantry, in the form of free health care andhigher procurement prices.20 This did not mean, however, that Gierekintended to allow the present tenure arrangements to continueindefinitely. But instead of using the traditional method ofcollectivization through political coercion, the new leadership inventedan economic incentive to persuade growing numbers of peasants to giveup their uneconomic private plots voluntarily. The rgime offered anincreasingly elderly peasant farm population attractive pensions in returnfor the transfer of their private plots to a state land fund. This could becredibly presented as a generous means of relieving ageing farmers of theneed to labour on into their old age, to keep up a meagre subsistence aftertheir sons had long since travelled to the cities in search of industrial jobs.Furthermore, the state Land Fund was to be formally (though to anegligible extent in practice) entitled to hand its newly acquired land notonly to collective farms but also to the most efficient private farmersauseful way of turning doubts about the scheme on the part of rich farmersinto possible enthusiasm. In this way Gierek hoped to both increaseproduction and keep the peasantry contented, while gaining kudos withMoscow.Dynamic Economic Growth

In the heady days of 1972 and 1973, when the rgimes new economicpolicy was bringing an increasingly religious bent to the imagery of theParty propagandists, terms like the Polish economic miracle, or theresurrection of Polish industry became fashionable. And there is nodoubt that between 1971 and 1976, both the Polish economy and workers living standards grew more rapidly than ever before. Between 1971and 1976, the drive for industrial modernization resulted in a situationwhere, by the beginning of last year, 43 per cent of all means ofproduction in Polish industry were less than five years old.21

20In March 1971, supplies of fodder to the farmers were increased and procurement pricesraised for meat, lard, and milk. (Trybuna Ludu, 20 March). In April, a programme ofsweeping changes was announced (Trybuna Ludu, 18 April): all compulsory deliveries to thestate were to be abolished; full property titles were granted to over a million farmers whoseproperty status had not been secure; comprehensive free health services were granted to thefamilies of private farmers; and a basic change in the system of land taxes was promised.21Trybuna Ludu, 23 January 1976.

79

Moreover, the Party leaderships promises to gear economic

development towards improving living standards were in considerablemeasure made good, thanks to a big shift of investment resources, asshown in Table 3.TABLE 3Average growth rates of consumer goods productionas % of the growth of producer goods production

As Table 4 shows, the stagnant real incomes of the 1960s bear smallresemblance to the rate of growth of Polish real incomes during the firstfive years of the 1970s. The official figure for the growth of average realwages during the entire five year period to the end of 1975 is 40 per cent(the growth in money wages being 56 per cent).22 Although this figureexaggerates the gains madeby, for example, not taking into account therise in prices on the private markets23there is no question that Polishliving standards rose very rapidly: during the whole decade of the 1960sthe official rise of real wages had been a mere 20 per cent; in half the timethe rate of increase had doubled. How was this achieved? What were thesources of economic growth?TABLE 4Increases in real incomes as % of the figure for the previous year

22 These were the figures given by Jaroszewicz in his report to the CC Plenum on 20November 1975, reported by the official Polish press agency.23 Free market prices have risen considerably: since 1970, pork has risen by more than athird, beef by about 30 per cent, etc.

80

As mentioned earlier, the main driving force was low-interest Western

credits which enabled Poland to import plant from the capitalist world ona huge scale. Polands foreign trade turnover shot up during the earlyseventies, increasing by 105 per cent in 1971, 193 per cent in 1972 and257 per cent in 1973.24 Table 5 spells out the story in more detail.Table 6 underlines the structural change in Polish trade more clearly.TABLE

Distribution of Polish trade between Comecon and the advanced capitalist countries

Comecon shareCapitalist shareSOURCE:

19716228

19725932

19735340

19744744

Rocznik Statysztyczny 1975.

The economic advantages of such import-investments from the capitalist

world could be very considerable. They brought improved technologyand the possibility of increasing exports. Moreover, such imports couldproduce a dramatic shortening of investment cycles. For example, inPoland a domestically-built food industry project takes, on average,between twenty-eight and forty-two months to complete, whereas thebuilding time for imported projects of this type during the last five yearsdid not exceed eighteen months. Two American-produced refrigeratedwarehouses were built in Lublin and Lagisza within a twelve-monthperiod, while previous Polish projects of this sort had taken betweentwenty-four and thirty-two months to complete.25In pursuit of modernization and growth through import-investments,the Government made an important institutional reform in the foreigntrade field. A series of industrial enterprises were given the right to bypass the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Maritime Economy and borrowhard currency direct from Polands Commercial Bank. The money couldbe spent abroad at the managements discretion, and could be used toacquire anything from production lines to complete plants. There wasonly one important condition: in due course the enterprise would have togenerate sufficient exportable merchandise or services to repay the initialloan in hard currency. The aim behind this so-called samosplata principlewas to release the entrepreneurial energies of the enterprises, and it didindeed become an important mechanism stimulating the credit-led boom.The very important food-processing industry trebled its overallinvestments for the entire period of 19715, as compared with theprevious five-year period. But in comparison with the latter period, itsimport investments increased tenfold between 1971 and 1975. Themachine industrys import investments between 1971 and 1975 were sixtimes larger than they had been in the previous five-year period, and in1974 no less than 45 per cent of all new investments in the machine24

Zycie Warszawy, 18 May 1975.

Hungary provides a particularly striking example of the economic advantages to begained from participation in the world capitalist market: it bought a new process formanufacturing artificial fertilizers from the West for 153 million forints; this would havecost an estimated 120 million forints and taken twelve years to perfect if developed purelyfrom domestic resources (see Zycie Warszawy, 16 June 1975).

25

81

industry consisted of imported plant. Polish light industry completed

twenty-one major investment projects between 1971 and 1975 and nine ofthese were entirely financed through samosplata arrangements.26As for Western credits to finance these enormous import bills, Gierek wasremarkably successful in negotiating loans worth thousands of millionsof dollars, both through his diplomatic initiatives, especially vis--visGermany and France, and also through direct arrangements withcapitalist bankers. It is not easy to quantify the exact aggregate figures forall capitalist credits to Poland, but what is absolutely clear is the fact thatPoland turned towards Western credits and trade on a scale which wasqualitatively greater than that of any other East European country.Between 1971 and 1975 the Polish leadership, like a Dostoyevskycharacter at a roulette table, was piling all its economic chips on Westerntrade.ConsultationGiereks Politburo hoped that this economic strategy would produce arise in living standards adequate to ease the frustrations of the workersand make them prepared to look on the Party leadership with a tolerant, ifnot an enthusiastic eye. The rgime knew that without proof of economicbenefits over the subsequent eighteen months, Giereks leadership couldscarcely hope to survive. But the new team had also learnt enough fromthe Baltic crisis to understand that new political ideas for ruling thecountry were also necessary. Gomulka had been able to survive for yearson the political capital of his triumph in October 1956. The new mencould count on no such breathing space. They had heard the risingpolitical demands of the working class at one mass meeting after anotherover a period of months. In these conditions, the Party leadership wasurgently required to come forward in front of the masses with a definitionof the new political situation, after the fall of Gomulka and the climbdown over the price increases. What was the new political order underGierek to be like and how was it going to differ from the Gomulka era?Since head-on confrontation with the working class was ruled out by thenew leadership as a short or even medium-term perspective, this questionurgently required an answer. Moreover, equally important, Gierek had tobe sure that the machinery of the state would be able to defend andenforce whatever definition of the new political order was offered.During the months from December to April, Gierek was simplyimprovising a series of political manoeuvres: winning various forms ofmoral and material support from Brezhnev; offering a series of economicconcessions; successfully bidding for sympathy from the peasantry andthe Church; leaning on the passivity of the students and intellectuals; andcarrying off several dramatic debating marathons with mass meetings ofstriking workers. But what did these disparate activities signify about thedirection of the new leaderships policy? Above all, what did the massmeetings mean? A sign of temporary weakness to be followed by a futurecrack-down? Or the first step towards a thoroughgoing programme of26 An extensive discussion of the experience with samosplata arrangements was published inPolitykas monthly supplement Export-Import, No. 8, August 1975.

82

proletarian democracy? These questions, urgently posed within both the

bureaucracy and the working class were not given a clear answer until theApril Plenum of the Central Committee. For the leaderships dilemmawas awesome in its longer-term implications for Polish and possibly EastEuropean politics in the future.On one side, the direction of working-class demands was unmistakable.The workers, especially on the Baltic, were demanding measureswhose logic was to replace bureaucratic dictatorship with a new form ofstate embodying the principles of proletarian democracy. By meeting thestriking workers, Gierek had effectively thrown a mantle of legitimacy onthose involved in the struggle: they were neither the dupes of imperialismnor the hooligans Gomulka had claimed them to be, but had a case whichneeded to be discussed. In some way, the rgime had to offer a definitionof the new situation that could be demonstrated in practice to besignificantly different from the Gomulkist era. At least to some degree, ithad to offer concessions to the aspirations of the working class. Yet anyserious move towards political democratization was out of the questionfor a rgime of the type that Gierek led. Leaving aside any personalinclinations on the part of the Silesian boss and the people he had broughtwith him to Warsaw from Katowiceand Gierek had never shown theslightest inclination towards democratization in the pasttwooverwhelmingly dominant obstacles stood in the way: the mostimportant was that of the Soviet leadership itself, in collaboration withthe other bureaucratic rgimes in Eastern Europe; the second was thePolish bureaucratic apparatus, made up of tens of thousands of state andParty functionaries with everything to lose from such a programme.Gierek tried to resolve this dilemma on two complementary levels: thenational political arena on one side, and the everyday mechanisms ofbureaucratic control on the other. His aim was to re-consolidate thesubstance of the bureaucratic rgime, but to provide it with a morepalatable form for resolving national political conflicts. On the nationallevel, Gierek launched a new slogan: consultations! Subsidiary to this, butof some importance, was a second watchword: Polands new historic roleas the driving force for dtente in Europe. At a local level, on the otherhand, the essential mechanisms of social, political and repressive controlwere to be maintained intact or, to be more accurate, to be restored, withone proviso: the local authorities were to be brought more tightly underthe control of the Party centre.From an ideological point of view, the slogan of consultations wasembarrassingly inconsistent. Little sense could be made of a theory whichdeclared that Poland had been a socialist or popular democracy since theend of the 1940s, but that now this democratic rgime was going to takethe novel step of actually consulting the population before adopting apolicy! But from a political point of view, the slogan had its merits. WereGiereks meetings with the workers a sign of weakness or a cynical trick?Not at all: they were the start of a new policy of consultation! What was theproblem about Gomulka? He had failed to consult the people. From nowon, meetings between the Party leadership and the workerslike thosethat had taken place on the Baltic and in Lodzwould become a regularfeature of the situation. Furthermore, in order to make these83

consultations meaningful, there would be a new openness about the

countrys problems and a more relaxed attitude towards the provision ofaccurate information in the mass media.The slogan of consultation was to be used as the complement to arestoration of bureaucratic controls on the ground. By offeringconsultation between workers and leaders, Gierek planned to makepossible the rebuilding of order in the cities and factories of the country.At the same time, such a local restoration of order would in turn ensurethat consultation would not get out of hand. Simultaneously, the Partyleadership was going to try to get the maximum domestic political capitalout of its search for credits from capitalist Western Europe and itsinternational championing of dtente. This was not at all a question ofmoving towards a new independence from the Soviet leadership. But itwas an attempt to follow the Soviet orientation in such a way as to appealto nationalist sentiments among the Polish masses, who would see theParty leadership taking small initiatives, travelling to the capitals of theWest and so on.The New Policy in Practice

Those given to drawing rapid generalizations, not least the bourgeois

journalists assigned to the East European circuit and looking for somecatchy new angle on developments there, were tempted to see somethingof permanent historical interest in Giereks new political style: the newwind blowing in Eastern Europe or, as the unfortunate Richard Davy ofThe Times put it less than a month before the events of last June, PolandGets the Best of Both Worlds.27 Future events will show that, from ahistorical point of view, Gierekism was a transient improvization, theproduct of a flexible leadership faced by the balance of forces that theworking class had created in 1971. But the adoption of these moresophisticated methods by the rgime was nonetheless, as we shall see, ofconsiderable political importance in shaping the form of politicaldevelopments up to the June crisis. And for the first three years ofGiereks rule, the consultationist style seemed very effective.The most important practical effect of consultationism was the fact thatthe bureaucracy was prepared to allow the masses, within certain narrowlimits, to express opinions and even protest against aspects of policy. Thelimits were, of course, that nothing in any way resembling an organizedpolitical group was allowed, and nothing resembling a general protestagainst the rgime as a whole would be tolerated. Even to make a writtenprotest or hold a work stoppage was risky; but in contrast to other EastEuropean countries, in Poland such protests no longer meant the virtualcertainty of a rapid confrontation with the militia or the political police.This was the most important aspect of the innovation which Gierekcalled consultation.The more formal aspects of consultationism were almost entirelycosmetic. Mass meetings between Party and Government leaders and theworkers continued on a fairly frequent but irregular basis: for example,27

The Times, 15 June 1976.

84

Gierek held some thirteen such meetings with Baltic shipyard workersbetween March 1971 and November 1975, in addition to about a dozenmeetings with the Party apparatus in the ports during the same period.28These mass meetings were carefully stage-managed to ensure nothingunpleasant or unexpected happened in front of the TV cameras andmicrophonesthe meetings were often broadcast in edited formbutprecisely because the idea was to show an authentic dialogue with theworking class, criticisms from the workers had to be allowed. Anotherstep on the part of the rgime was to link the Party organizations in about160 of the largest factories directly to the Central Committee Secretariat,giving them the right to by-pass the local and regional authorities. Thiswas, in fact, to assist the drive for modernization and higher productivity,by allowing the central leadership to by-pass local bureaucratic inertia orsabotage of central policies; but it was also presented in the guise of a newmeasure to strengthen the link between the leadership and the workingclass. As another cosmetic measure, a few genuine manual workers inproductive employment were seated on the Central Committee,conference delegates were much more heavily weighted towards workersthan had been the case in the 1960s, and so on. Yet another aspect of thenew style was a more sophisticated use of the media: the rgime madeserious efforts to increase the amount and the reliability of information inthe media.29 For example, some work stoppages would be mentioned,though often with the rider that they had been caused by bad weather orsome other act of God. Ministers would be brought on to TV to answerviewers questions, and the government became more ready toacknowledge publicly irritating social and economic problems.Giereks direct negotiations with the workers on strike in 1971 were aprice which the Party leadership thought well worth paying in exchangefor ensuring that the basic institutions of political power on which Gierekreliedthe political police, the militia, the army and the Party machinewere preserved during the workers offensive. Despite demands for trialsof police chiefs and leading party officials, Gierek was able to maintainthe basic institutions intact. Nevertheless, one institution above all othershad been very badly mauled; the trade-union machine. During the courseof the crisis, the Party leaders could afford to allow the trade-unionapparatus locally to go to the winds: by the summer of 1971, over 50 percent of local trade-union officials throughout the country had beenthrown out of office by pressure from the workers.30 In many areas, thelocal mechanisms for disciplining the workers in the factories had brokendown. But no new independent unions had been formed and the Partyleadership, after removing the old discredited national leadership of thetrade unions, prepared for a long haul to re-establish local control. Thiswas to be done partly by expelling obviously unreliable worker membersof the Partyin 1971 alone about 150,000 worker members were28During the same period, Gierek paid about ten visits to Lodz. But the great bulk of thepublicized meetings were with Party members, rather than with the broad mass of industrialworkers.29Gierek has established an especially close relationship with the countrys leadingjournalists, setting up a system of regular, personal, off-the-record briefings for about 200 ofthem. The system is described in Polityka, 21 February 1976.30Rouge, Paris, 27 January 1973.

85

expelled;31 partly by co-opting those of the workers leaders who could

be attracted by the prospect of substantial economic and social privilegesas functionaries; and partly by a slow, but increasingly ruthless,destruction of the most determined vanguard elements in the factories.The successful climax of this campaign to restore control from above inthe trade unions came with the Seventh Trade-Union Congress inNovember 1972. This first national trade-union conference since the fallof Gomulka was markedly different from its predecessor in a number ofways. There was a five-fold increase in the number of delegates who hadbeen directly elected in the large factories32in one plant the workersactually went on strike against an attempt by local bureaucrats to rig theselection of the factorys delegation.33 Within the congress itself, therewas a significant leftist oppositional element opposing the Party on anumber of issues. Baluka, the chairman of the Szczecin strike committee,was a delegate to the congress; and one of the delegates from the Zeranfactory in Warsawwhich had spearheaded the workers movementback in 1956felt confident enough to declare: 70 per cent of our unionofficials are a virtual army of paper shufflers and titular delegates for tripsabroad; they go to Bulgaria to look for furs, to Czechoslovakia for shoesand to the USSR for cars.34 A battle took place during the Congress overthe proposed, new Labour Code, a number of clauses of which werestrongly opposed by delegates. When several of the delegates threatenedto walk out if the code was put to the vote, the leadership decided not topress for its ratification. From the Partys point of view this was a sideissue. The main thing was to demonstrate by means of this Congress thatthe trade-union apparatus nationally was firmly back under the rgimescontrol. This was effectively proved by the near unanimous vote for thePartys leadership slate: only Edmund Baluka and a handful of otherdelegates opposed the list. Afterwards the tone of the trade-unionfunctionaries began to change. Once again, their main functions were tobe, in the words of the new Union President, those of activatingproduction and ideological education.But at the very time when the Union Congress was demonstrating thesuccess of the Partys drive to re-consolidate its grip on the institutionalstructure of Polish society, the working class was showing a continuedability to act independently of this structure in trying to settle importantissues. In November 1972, the national price freeze won by the textileworkers in Lodz in February 1971 was approaching its end: the precisedecision had been to continue the price freeze only for two extra years,not indefinitely. There was growing concern in the working class that theleadership would scrap the freeze in December. There was also an evidentconfidence that mass action could force a satisfactory solution of theproblem.Just before the Congress started, the shipyard workers of Gdansk andSzczecin struck. Gierek and Jaroszewicz again caught a plane to the Baltic31

See Jan B. de Weydenthal, Party Development in Contemporary Poland, College of William

and Mary, Virginia, USA.32Neal Ascherson in The Observer, 24 September 1972.33James Feron, New York Times, 15 September 1972.34Intercontinental Press, 5 March 1973.86

to discuss with the workers, examine the problem and, more to thepoint, end the strike. No sooner were the Party leader and Prime Ministerback in Warsaw, with the Congress underway, when the women textileworkers of Lodz struck. They were then followed by the miners at fourKatowice mines. The Polish working class was on the move again. Inevery area where the strikes took place, the workers demanded acontinuation of the price freeze beyond the two-year limit. The Lodzwomen workers coupled this with a claim for an immediate 15 per centwage rise; the Katowice miners demanded 25 per cent. Most menacing ofall were the voices on the Baltic coast, for the shipyard workers wereagain demanding trade-union independence from the Party and freeelections of both factory delegates and union leaders.35 Not for the lasttime, TV programmes were interrupted by the features of Prime MinisterJaroszewicz, who categorically promised that the price freeze wouldcontinue through 1973.36 In Silesia order was restored through thedistribution of food-purchasing coupons. But here the rgime added anew ingredient, showing its growing confidence in its own strength:thirty of the Katowice miners were arrested.The simultaneous occurrence of this strike movement and the tradeunion congress nicely illustrated the most salient features of the politicalrelation of forces in the middle period of Giereks rule to date. In day-today relations with the workers, the rgime was master of the situation.But this mastery was on a certain basis and within certain limits. The basiswas that workers could express their grievances on particular issues evenby striking, without such acts automatically leading to a head-onconfrontation with the rgimes military apparatus. The national limits ofGiereks mastery were those set by the relationship of forces establishedin 1971: a freeze on prices, economic development and a readiness to talkto and even listen to the most well organized sectors of the working class.It should also be remembered that the apparent political stabilizationachieved by late 1972 also involved a still quiescent student andintellectual community, a reasonably contented Church and a peasantrywhich, especially in the case of its richer elements, had been doing quitewell out of the new Party leadership. None of these features werenecessarily immutable.Reorganization of the Party

Perhaps the most remarkable of Giereks achievements during the first

half of the seventies was his thoroughgoing reorganization of the Partyand state machinery and his simultaneous imposition of his ownundisputed mastery of the Party apparatus. In a series of bold strokes, hedestroyed the old factional groupings of the Gomulka period, eliminatedpotential rivals and destroyed the regional centres of resistance to centralauthority which he had himself used to great effect during the sixties.35 Rouge,

1 June 1973, contains a full account of this crisis.

fact, the official price freeze was to remain in operation up to the time of writing. InJanuary 1974 the prices of petrol, taxi fares and alcoholic drinks were officially increasedquite steeply. At the same time, the rgime raised wages and maintained the price freeze onfood. Of course, prices on the free markets rose steeply, and the rgime tried variousdevious ways of increasing prices by putting a new label on the old product and thencharging higher prices, etc. But the official freeze remained a real benefit for the population.36 In

87

In December 1970, Giereks path to the top post had been smoothed bythe support of the Moczarites; there was indeed some speculation in theWestern press that the Silesian boss might be simply a stop-gap figure, tobe replaced by Moczar himself in the near future. Instead, Gierekdecisively defeated Moczar at the April 1971 CC Plenum, after the latterhad apparently made an abortive bid for supreme power.37 At the SixthParty Congress of December 1971, Gierek consolidated his position asGeneral Secretary and evidently rewarded the man who had helped himdefeat Moczar, Franciszek Szlachcic, by promoting him from theMinistry of the Interior to the number two position in the Partyhierarchy. At the start of 1974, when Soviet pressure was resulting in aseries of measures to tighten up the rgimes ideological controls,Szlachcic was himself suddenly demoted, and at the Seventh PartyCongress of 1975 was stripped of his last vestiges of power.38 Szlachcichad evidently been canvassing support for a more independent posturevis--vis the Soviet leadership; with his removal the last serious potentialchallenger to Gierek had been removed. By the start of 1976, Gierek hadlittle to fear from his own Politburo and Secretariat.39Under Gomulka, the Party centre had to reckon with the power ofseventeen regional Party Secretaries, whose local patronage couldfacilitate the accumulation of considerable resources for resisting ordistorting central directives. During his fifteen years as Silesian PartySecretary, Gierek had been able to acquire such regional power that hisarea earned the nick-name of the Polish Katanga. After shoring up hisposition in the Party leadership, Gierek prepared for a crushing assault onthese regional power-centres. A brains-trust Committee on Economicand State Management, set up in February 1971, had been preparing aplan for reorganizing state administration. This had been due forpublication and discussion at the Seventh Party Congress of December1975. Instead, Gierek decided to take the regional apparatuses by storm,and unveiled the plan at the 12 May CC Plenum in 1975 with instructionsthat the new system was to operate from 1 June, a mere three weeks later!At one stroke, the seventeen regions (voivodships) were to be replaced byforty-nine much smaller voivodship units. This balkanization of the37

The Moczar faction, named after its leader the former head of the Security PoliceGeneral Moczar, emerged at the start of the sixties when it became clear that Gomulkasdrive against the democratizing currents of 1956 was not going to extend to a mass purge oferstwhile liberals in the bureaucracy itself. The faction, often called the Partisans since itcontrolled the war veterans association, possessed a strong base in the Security Police andacquired a growing following among lower and middle-level Party functionaries. It usedanti-intellectual and anti-Semitic themes in its drive against the liberals many of whomwere Jewish. But the faction also leant on a strong nationalist propaganda which, thoughundoubtedly appealing to sectors of the apparatus, put Moscow on its guard. For an interesting assessment of Moczars role in the Baltic crisis, see J. Steven, The Hundred Days ofGierek, in International Marxist Review, No. 1, June 1971.38 On the turn in early 1974, see below.39 Szlachcics meteoric career had begun in Silesia as a local police chief and Gierek protegat the start of the sixties. He was made deputy Minister of the Interior under Moczar in 1962,almost certainly as a means of trying to check the latters activities. In February 1971 he became Minister of the Interior, and in December 1971 at the Sixth Party Congress he madethe remarkable jump of becoming not only a full CC member, but a full member of thePolitburo and the CC Secretariat. From that time until the start of 1974, he heldresponsibility as CC Secretary for internal security and for foreign policy. So confident didSzlachcic become that he felt able to tell a student meeting how he saw Polish relations withthe USSR: like a good cup of teastrong, but not too sweet!88

provincial state and Party apparatuses was combined with abolition of allthe district units, which had hitherto been intermediary between thevoivodships and the parishes. By eliminating the districts, the Partyleadership was both shortening the chain of command and removing animportant layer of patronage previously held by the voivodshipsecretaries. Within a week of the May CC Plenum, Trybuna Ludu hadannounced that the Party first secretaries of Gdansk, Lublin, Cracow,Byalystok and Rzeszow voivodships had been recalled and placed at thedisposal of the Central Committee. Undoubtedly, there was a long-termpolitico-economic rationale for these changes, in the context of the socialand economic transformation of Poland since the sixties. But the speedand ruthlessness of their execution indicated that the leadership wasequally concerned to destroy the regional power-bases which couldseriously weaken the central authorities, particularly in a time of crisis.Another dimension of the leaderships drive to renovate the Partymachine after 1971 has been a sweeping replacement of personnel in theCentral Committee and an apparent attempt to strengthen the workingclass component within the aktiv. (The aktiv is that layer of the Partymembership on which the apparatus relies to implement Party policy.Formerly volunteers, the aktiv members are in practice overwhelminglystate functionaries, enterprise directors, educational directors and othertypes of social manager.) At the Sixth and Seventh Party Congresses, thegreat bulk of the old members of the Central Committee were removed infavour of men who owed their rise to Gierek and his team. By the beginning of 1976, over 80 per cent of the 251 people making up the full anddeputy members of the Central Committee had joined that body for thefirst time during Giereks period of office.Information on the role of working-class membership within the aktiv isless easy to quantify. The numerically largest group among full CCmembers elected at the Seventh Party Congress were thirty-one peopledesignated as industrial workers; over 40 per cent of Conferencedelegates too were credited with being actual industrial workers.40 Inaddition to these quantitative indices, which give a very inflatedimpression of the importance of worker members within the aktiv, thelinking of Party committees in the sixty largest industrial plants directlywith the CC secretariat and Giereks repeated meetings with the industrialaktiv in factories throughout the country show a serious effort onGiereks part to strengthen his links with that particular constituency.At the Seventh Party Congress, Brezhnev particularly praised the Polishleaders for their work of renovation, noting that the Party was nowcohesive and confident of its strength. To all appearances, Gierek hadfound a new combination of policies for stabilizing bureaucratic rule inEastern Europe in the post-1968 era. Instead of trying to experiment withradical reforms of the planning mechanism, he had sought an opening tothe capitalist West. And instead of jeopardizing the Partys monopoly bydismantling political controls, he had combined a drive to furtherconcentrate power in the hands of the Party leadership with a greater40

An analysis of the new Central Committee is made by Zygmunt Szeliga in Polityka, 20

December 1975.89

readiness to allow an airing of grievances on the part of the broad and

amorphous mass of the population.

New ContradictionsThe Seventh Party Congress in December 1975 was organized as atriumphant celebration of the first five years of Giereks leadership: theeconomic growth, the unprecedented rise in living standards, the unity ofthe Partyall these achievements were paraded before the top brass ofEastern Europe and the Polish people. But informed observers couldalready see that the strategy for recovery outlined in 1971 was beingundermined by new economic and political contradictions.Growing Indebtedness to the Capitalist World

The Government had always expected Polish trade with the capitalistcountries to move initially into deficit. But it had expected that by themid-seventies the trend would start moving in the opposite direction.This did not happen, as table 7 shows. Of the gross deficit betweenJanuary and September 1975, 20,000 million zloty was the result of tradewith advanced capitalist countries.TABLE 7Polands balance of payments deficit in millions of zloty

19711972197319741975 (Jan. to Sept.)TotalSOURCE:

6621,4794,7487,1989,93524,022

Polityka, 20 September 1975.

In addition to this trade deficit, Poland had an estimated $7,000 million

debt in long-term loans from the capitalist world by the end of 1975 andmany of these loans were falling due for repayment.41 Thus 13 per cent ofexports to the world capitalist market during 1974 had not in fact beenbalancing the years import bill: they had been paying off Western loans.By 1975, no less than 25 per cent of Polish exports to the capitalist worldwere being used for debt repayments. Worse still, inflation in thecapitalist world meant that Polands steadily rising hard-currency billfrom Western imports did not at all imply a commensurate rise in thephysical volume of investment goods purchased in the West. In hisspeech to the Seventh Party Congress in December 1975, the PrimeMinister had this to say about the impact of Western inflation since thebeginning of 1973: Our expenses on capitalist markets in that periodincreased in relation to the price level of 1972 by close to $2,000 million.42This is another way of saying that in three years the value of Polandscredits from the West dropped by $2,000 milliona staggering blow.But it was not only Western inflation which blew Giereks gamble to thewinds. The capitalist recession simultaneously took its toll, both directly41 See

estimate of the Journal of Commerce, 13 April 1976, for the position at the end of 1975.Ludu, 10 December 1975.

42 Trybuna

90

and through the restrictive measures taken by individual capitalist

countries. It is difficult to quantify the impact of this aspect of the worldcapitalist crisis on the Polish balance of payments. But trade with Italyillustrates this impact clearly enough. For some years, one of the fewPolish success stories in its trade with Common Market countries was itsdealings with Italy. But in 1974 the Italian government banned the importof Polish livestock and beef and tightened up on other Polish goods. As aresult of these restrictions, Polish trade plunged into deficit.43TABLE 8Polands trade Balance with Italy in millions of zloty

19601965197019711972197319741975SOURCE:

Total trade208342137462914411524153232159823897

Balance353277160226022106169512283963

Biuletyn Statystyczny, January 1976.

A further, though indirect, consequence of the capitalist crisis was the

sudden leap in the price of Soviet oil sales to Poland at the beginning of1975. The Soviet leadership forced a break with Comecons past pricepolicy and arranged for yearly Comecon price adjustments to matchworld prices, instead of the five-yearly price reviews which had operatedsince 1958. This enabled the USSR to increase its oil prices to Poland at astroke by 130 per cent as of January 1975 and by a further 8 per cent at thebeginning of 1976. This was a severe blow to the Polish economy, whichdrew the vast bulk of its oil from Soviet sources. The blow was allthe worse for being entirely unforeseen. All in all, by mid-1975 Giereksgamble on credits from, and trade with, the capitalist world as the drivingforce of sustained economic growth was coming badly unstuck. ThePolish economy had become heavily committed to the capitalist West andit was finding itself increasingly unable to meet its commitments.Failure of the Productivity Drive

The Polish leadership had taken its hopes for Western capitalism forreality: it had not taken seriously enough the possibility of a severecapitalist crisis combining hyper-inflation with serious industrialrecession. But the capitalist crisis cannot be held entirely responsible forthe sharp rise of Polands indebtedness. After all, it had at least onemitigating effect: inflation in the West should have made Polish exportsmore competitive. Yet in spite of a real quantitative rise in the monetaryvalue of Polish exports to the advanced capitalist countries, no exportbreakthrough took place. The reason was that the undoubtedmodernization of Polish industry since 1971 had still not eradicated longterm structural problems. In particular, the hoped-for change in thestructure of Polish exports to the West had not occurred. The main43

In 1975, the percentage of food in Polish exports to Italy dropped from over 50 per cent to136 per cent.91

branches involved changed little during the first five years of theseventiesagricultural produce, coal and shipbuilding remained thechief items, along with other raw materials. The hoped-for breakthroughby the machine industry on the basis of improved, imported plant did nottake place.One clue to the reasons for this is contained in Table 9, whose figuresbecome even more significant when we learn that, apart from the buildingmaterials industry, two sectors are mainly responsible for the increase inrejects: the machine industry and heavy engineeringtwo key industriesfrom the point of view of providing the country with a strong exportprofile for tackling Western markets. In fact, the percentage of Polishexports to the West which consisted of machinery remained at the verylow level of 13 per cent in 1975. There are some signs that the buying ofWestern technology has boosted Polish sales of machinery to otherComecon countries, but that does not solve the central problem.TABLE 9Total industrial rejects in millions of zloty19707,00319717,75519728,59519739,433197411,2211975 (First 6 months)6,120SOURCE:

Zycie Gospodarcze, 12 October 1975.

Examination of the problems in Polands coal industry will indicate some

of the central obstacles on the road to a thoroughly competitive industrialstructure. The Polish mining industrys expansion has each year beenfacing a more acute labour shortage. This is a besetting problem nowthroughout Polish industry, and is growing more acute each year. Theproblem can be tackled either by increasing the average productivity ofthe existing labour force in mining, or by attracting new workers to theindustry. Let us examine each of these options. Labour productivity canbe increased either by the introduction of new technology, by speed-up,or by lengthening the working day. The introduction of new technologysimply poses the problem of imports from the West, instead of solvingit. A lengthening of the working day has been completely impossible forpolitical reasons: in the last five years it has on the contrary beenpolitically necessary for the rgime to shorten the working day (byproviding a number of Saturdays off ). Only speed-up remained.Throughout Polish industry, the rgime has made great efforts to expandrelative surplus product through speed-up, above all by using newmethods of wage payment: productivity deals bringing in measured daywork, bonus schemes and piece-rates. It is very difficult to assess theoverall effects of this drive, which began in earnest after the SeventhCongress of Trade Unions. In the shipyards of the Baltic the initialproductivity scheme met with powerful strikes in 1974 and had to bemodified. There have been many other reports of strikes against newbonus schemes. But the overall balance-sheet of this drive is almostimpossible to make in the absence of comprehensive information. Two92

things, however, are clear. In the first place, a significant number of socalled productivity deals in the exporting sector of industry were almostentirely bogus: what looked like increases in productivity were in factcases of exporting enterprises making use of Western inflation to raisetheir own export prices, and therefore their revenue and wage fund,without any real increase in productivitythat is, in relative surplusproduct. It was only towards the end of 1974 that the government beganto realize what was going on and to take measures aimed at closing theloophole. Secondly, where productivity deals were inaugurated, thesewere heavily counter-balanced by a decline in work discipline. Theplanning authorities calculated that in 1975 no less than 10 per cent oftotal working time was being wasted through such problems asabsenteeism. And that enormous figure brings us back to politics.One of the direct causes of absenteeism was a concession granted by thergime in the face of the Baltic upsurge: workers were given sicknessbenefits at the level of 100 per cent of pay. It should come as no surprisethat workers used this concession to ease their work load. And why not?The privileges of a bloated bureaucracy remained as glaring as they hadbeen before 1971, while the bureaucrats were as unproductive as ever.The trade unions were returning to their old role of agents for squeezinggreater productivity out of the workers, so control of the management offactories remained firmly in the hands of the privileged and unproductivebattalions of officials. There was no workers control of production andno proletarian democracy. Why break your back for the privilege ofbeing consulted, as the rgime claimed, by the parasitic bureaucracy? ThePolish working class was making sure that it extracted at least part of theprice that should be paid for the continued existence of a privilegedbureaucratic caste. No miraculous rise in the average productivity oflabour was to be forthcoming in these socio-political circumstances.Therefore, in the mining industry as in other potentially dynamic exportcentres of the Polish economy, the main way of increasing output was byattracting new workers through the payment of higher than averagewages. In Silesia in 1974, for example, the miners gained two substantialpay increases within the space of nine months. The first was publiclyannounced and amounted to 12 per cent. The second, in the autumn, wasfor 30 per cent and was not publicly announced by the rgime at any time,for fear that other workers would demand equivalent increases.44 Thesame story applied to the ship-building industry, where workers wagesgrew to levels far above the national average, partly for political reasonsand partly because of the potential importance of the ship-buildingindustry as an earner of hard currency.The losing Battle to supply Consumer Markets

The crucial political objective behind the Polish governments import-led

boom had been to gain popular consent by satisfying the long-suppressedconsumption needs of the Polish masses. But Polands indebtedness to44

The 12 per cent rise was mentioned in Polityka, 25 February 1974. The 30 per centincreases occurred during October 1974, but were alluded to by Gierek only a year later, at aminers meeting.93

the capitalist world was, at least from the start of 1975, threatening to turnthese priorities upside down. The pressure was on to risk a showdownwith the Polish masses, by attacking their living standards in order to payback debts to Western bankers.But this was only one side of the rgimes dilemma by 1975. The otherside of the menacing politico-economic equation was the development ofa sharp imbalance between the level of purchasing power in the domesticeconomy and the supply of consumer goods, particularly food. The Partyleadership had asked Polish workers to judge its record above all by itsability to raise living standards. True enough, wages had shot up, on thewhole. Indeed, by the end of 1977 they had risen twice as high as had beenplanned at the Sixth Party Congress of December 197140 per centinstead of the scheduled 18 per cent. We have mentioned some of thereasons for this: wage increases in exporting enterprises taking advantageof higher prices on the capitalist market; sharp increases in key sectorslike mining to attract extra labour; and also, very importantly, thecombativity of the working class, expressed in the large number of strikesfor higher pay and improved bonus schemes. Two other processes shouldbe mentioned. In the first place, the labour force in the industrial sectorincreased to a much greater extent than planned, swelling the wage bill inthe state sector of the economy. Secondly, it seems clear that there wereoften wage rises as a result of the modernization of plant and consequentincreases in the productivity of labour, although statistical evidence ofthis is not available to the present writer. Finally, the incomes of theprivate peasantry rose substantially through a series of increases in stateprocurement prices, and through the governments extension of socialservices to the peasantry. The result of all these processes was a sharp risein demand for basic consumer goods.The bureaucracy was engaged in an ever more desperate struggle tosatisfy this new purchasing power, through a rapid expansion ofconsumer goods. By the beginning of 1975, this battle was clearly beinglost. Consumer markets were swinging into a sharp disequilibrium. TheParty weekly Polityka reported that at the end of 1974 the followingproduction shortages had appeared: 30,000 TV sets, 35,000 radios, 50,000refrigerators, along with large but unspecified shortages of washing andsewing machines, textiles and building materials.45 But this was far fromthe most serious aspect of the question. The really catastrophic crisis wasdeveloping on the food front. The food shortage that opened up at thebeginning of 1975 was not the result of a poor agricultural performanceduring the early seventies. From 1971 to the end of 1973, agriculturalproduction had in fact expanded faster than planned, and output in 1974still exceeded the figures of the previous year, although it was slightlybelow revised plan targets. Even in 1975, when Polish agriculture had abad year, meat production continued to rise above the 1974 figure by noless than 101 per cent.46 Overall, the 25 per cent increase in Polishagricultural output within five years was a fairly remarkable achievementby East European, not to speak of Soviet, standards. But it was utterlyinadequate to meet consumer demand.4546

Polityka, 6 March 1975.

Trybuna Ludu, 21 January 1976.

94

The rgime, perhaps through looking at the statistics from the armchairsof its own spacious and well-stocked apartments, had made anothermiscalculation here. It had assumed that the rise in workers wageswould bring a significant change in the structure of working-class familybudgets. At the beginning of the seventies, the average Polish householdspent no less than 50 per cent of its income on food. The plannersassumed that increases in wages would tend to be spent on items otherthan food, and that food consumption would soon level off. However,this has not occurred: food, especially meat, consumption has gone up atleast as fast as the rise in wages. Gierek spelt out the facts to the ccPlenum in September 1975: During the current five-year plan, per capitameat consumption will have increased by over 17 kg, or double the rateenvisaged by the Sixth Congress.47 Furthermore, there was anotherreason for the growing meat crisis in early 1975, a reason which the Partyleadership did its best to hide from the attention of the Polish masses.This concerned manoeuvres on the agricultural front.The Agricultural Dilemma

Agriculture had been doing reasonably well. But given the level ofconsumer demand, not well enough. The relative short-fall in grainproduction meant that five years after the target date set by Gomulka inthe sixties for Poland to become self-sufficient in grain, imports weresteadily rising, as Table 10 demonstrates. In the last two years, furthermore, a growing share of this import bill has had to be paid in hardcurrency to the North American grain market. For in 1975 the SovietUnion defaulted on its commitments to supply grain to Poland, forcingthe government to bid for American shipments. For two months, the USadministration placed an embargo on grain exports to Poland, and thenecessary supplies were eventually delivered only on condition thatPoland agreed to buy large quantities of American grain with hardcurrency on a regular basis during the following five-year period.48 Inother words, the trade deficit with the capitalist world was coming toreflect more than the import of Western industrial plant: it was beingused to assist the battle on the consumption front. Furthermore, anysharp rise in meat production would require a growth in the supply offodder to the peasants and such fodder also had to be imported.TABLE 10Polish grain imports (tons)

1971197219731974

2,793,0002,943,0003,084,0003,658,000

To get the increased production which had been achieved, the

Government was paying an increasingly heavy price. State procurement47Quoted in a Radio Free Europe transcript of a Radio Warsaw broadcast, 5 September1975.48True, there were reports that the USSR subsidized the first shipment of US grain in hardcurrency, but these subsidies do not appear to have covered the five-year contract as awhole. The contract involved buying 25 million tons of grain from the US annually. Atcurrent prices, the total cost of this would be 300 million dollars over five years.

95

prices for farm produce had been raised in 1971 and again on a number ofoccasions thereafter. The Party leadership recognized that one of thereasons for the poor supply situation after the 1974 harvest had been thegovernments failure to further increase procurement prices. Yet whilethe government was having to pay out ever larger sums to the peasantsfor food, it was having to continue sales of that food at the fixed 1966prices. An ever-growing slice of state revenue had to be diverted frominvestment needs in order to fill the resulting financial gap. By 1976, thisstate subsidy of prices had reached the truly staggering figure of 12 percent of Polands gross domestic product.49 This was an intolerable strainon state revenue. Yet attempts to tackle the problem at the procurementprice end would be completely self-defeating: the peasants would simplygo on strike. A foretaste of such a possibility had been given when privatefarmers, dissatisfied with 1974 pig-procurement prices, cut back thenumber of pigs bred for 1975 by one million, forcing the government toraise pig procurement prices by 11 per cent in the autumn of the latter yearin order to right the situation.50A long-term solution to such problems would, of course, be to rid Polishagriculture of its small private plots in one way or another, amalgamatingthem into large mechanized state or private farms. But as Table 11 shows,the successes of the post-1971 policy of using economic incentives to buyout smallholders were much too modest to produce any basic change inthe pattern of land tenure in the following five years. Moreover, even thesmall reduction in private ownership that had taken place had roused theanger of the Church.TABLE 11Proportion of agricultural land held by state, co-operative and private farms (%)

19701975SOURCE:

State farm166210

Co-operative farm1317

Private farm834790

Maly Rocznik Statystyczny 1976, p. 138.

But the agricultural dimension of the scissors crisis between Western

bankers and Polish consumers hit the Party leadership in yet another way.It had been hoped that industrial exports would replace Polandstraditional staple exports to the advanced capitalist world during the earlyseventies. With the failure of this to happen, Polands indebtednessplaced an added exporting responsibility on the traditional sectors. Nosector was more traditional than Polish meatin the sixties it had madeup almost a third of Polish exports to its biggest trading partner inWestern Europe at that time (Great Britain). In 1974 and early 1975, theParty leadership was quietly taking measures to drastically reduce meatimports and divert meat destined for the hard-pressed domestic marketon to the export road.

49 Economist,

11 December 1976.measure did not, however, satisfy the peasantry, who were facing rising prices offodder for livestock. The result has been a continuing crisis in the pig-breeding sector up tothe present time.50 This

96

The Scissors Close

In the Spring of 1975, all these various facets of the growing

contradictions between the Party leaderships need to meet its obligationsto the capitalist states and banks in the West, and its need to fulfil itspromises to the Polish consumer, came together to produce a sharp crisis.In March 1975, meat began to disappear from Polish shops. The Partyleadership was made aware of growing anger on the part of the masses. Asusual, Gierek pushed his Prime Minister on to the TV screen to offer someexplanations and appeal for patience. Jaroszewicz also signed an article inPolityka to guide the argument. The following week, the Party weekly feltbound to publish this acid response in a letter from a housewife:Although we have managed to get used to misinformation in the pressfor the last thirty years, what you (the Prime Minister) have written goesbeyond all limits. Do you consider your readers to be a collection ofinnocents, if not idiots?51 Attempting to benefit from its knowledge ofthe shipyard workers, gained in 197071, the Party leadership threw theArmys reserves, not of men but of meat, on to the markets of the Balticports and the Silesian mining areas. The only result was that the dreadedwomen textile workers of Lodz struck and demonstrated against the meatshortages. In Warsaw, shop windows were smashed and anti-Gierek wallcartoons appeared. And in another town south of the capital, a significantstruggle developed. Following the example of Lodz, the women workersat one of the towns largest factories, the Radoskor shoe factory, struckagainst the food shortages. The local Party bosses tried to hit back byarresting 150 of the women on strike. But the Party bosses had overreached themselves and were soon forced into headlong retreat: for themunitions workers at the towns biggest factory, the Walter MetalWorks, voted to strike unless all 150 women were immediately released.That was enough: the women were out in no time.52 At the time, thisincident did not acquire much prominence and the name of the town wassoon forgotten. But it is well known today: Radom.5351 Polityka,

5 April 1975.Spiegel, 31 March 1975.53 One aspect of the meat crisis remains a mystery. Jaroszewicz claimed that in order to endthe meat crisis the Government was forced to cut back on meat exports. But the December1975 trade figures from the official statistical office suggest a story that runs directly counterto Jaroszewiczs remarks. If we remember that the size of Polish exports of meat inDecember 1974 was 12,000 tons, and if we assume a similar figure for December 1975, wefind that there is no significant difference between the meat export figures for the years 1974and 1975. And if we look at the figures for meat imports, we find a dramatic drop in theamount of meat coming into the country in 1974. This must have drained the countrys meatreserves, thus contributing directly to the meat crisis of Spring 1975. Furthermore, wewould expect a substantial drop in the export figures for 1975 as a result of the Italian ban onPolish meat in 1974. All this suggests that Jaroszewicz was trying to conceal the fact that thegovernment had been taking meat out of the mouths of Polish workers to make a quick anddesperately needed killing on the capitalist market.52 Der

Polands external trade in meat and meat products (tons)

Year19711972197319741975 (to November)

Imports149,94054,59251,8835,803

Exports45,30645,57865,37699,37682,53097

The meat crisis passed. But it had been a rich experience for the rgime.As is generally the case in the non-capitalist societies of Eastern Europe,the masses hold the government responsible for every economicfluctuationnobody could have any doubt as to who holds everyeconomic control. Secondly, in Poland, as we have seen, Giereksaccession to power was not greeted by any enthusiasm on the part of themasses: he was accepted on the strength of his oft-repeated promise toprovide a continuously rising standard of living. Take consumer goods inlieu of proletarian democracythat had been Giereks offer. And whenhe failed to deliver the goods, even for a week or two, the response of themasses was immediate and sharp. What is more, the previousimprovements in living standards did not blunt popular anger overbreakdowns; quite the opposite, it produced an even strongerdetermination to resist any return to the sufferings of the past. In suchcircumstances, a meat famine is an intolerable insult and humiliation.The meat crisis of March 1975 passed, but the multiple contradictionswhich had produced it continued to intensify, acquiring an increasinglyuncontrollable and independent dynamic which made any resolution ofthe problems increasingly daunting. Yet until June 1976 the measureswhich the rgime attempted to take amounted to little more thangimmicks.54 Gierek could not indefinitely pursue simultaneous andincreasingly hectic love affairs with Western finance capital and Polishhousewives. Eventually, he would be forced to choose who was to bedisappointed. And it was not likely to be the bankers.Towards the June ExplosionIn the months preceding the announcement of price rises on 24 June 1976,the leaders of the PUWP acted like men in a trance. The multiple dangersigns were impossible to ignore, yet the entire political approach thatGierek and his team had adopted since December 1971 pushed them awayfrom thinking these problems through to resolute political conclusions foraction. Already by the end of 1975, a decision had been taken to increaseprices substantially the following yearGierek indicated as much in hisspeech to the Seventh Party Congress. A sudden clamp-down on importsfrom the West would have produced terrible dislocations throughout thePolish economy, while a really major rescue operation by the capitalistworld, even if politically possible, would have had serious repercussionson Polish-Soviet relations. Sharp domestic austerity measures were theonly viable option. Consumer demand had to be cut, the huge fiscal drainof price subsidies had to be ended and measures had to be taken toproduce a major structural change in Polish agriculture. These ideas wereincorporated in the price proposals outlined by Prime MinisterJaroszewicz on 24 June in a speech to the Sejm. Food prices were to riseby an average of 60 per cent to bring consumer demand into line withagricultural supplies. Simultaneously, increases in procurement priceswere to be linked to sharp increases in the prices of state supplies of raw54

These included changing labels and raising the prices, mentioned above, and alsomeasures to increase consumer saving such as putting a silver coin into every wage packet inthe hope that the recipients would put the souvenir under the mattress instead of spendingit.

98

materials to the peasantry; this would have the effect of economically

decimating the peasant smallholders, who would be unable to meet thenew raw material costs. In this way, land tenure could be rationalizedthrough a growth of large-scale state or private farms, while an increasedpool of labourers without class consciousness would be available forindustry. This much the Polish leadership worked out.But they were utterly incapable of translating these ideas into realisticpolitical tactics. They decided to bring the price increases into force at oneblow, instead of staggering them as the Hungarian leadership did during19756. They warned the population in advance that increases werecoming, without indicating their size and without creating a suitableatmosphere of national crisis. And they promised consultations, but didnot consult.At the same time, the leadership pushed through a number of Sovietinspired institutional changes. Amid protests, the Youth organizationswere merged into one single Komsomol-type body in the spring of1976.55 The leader of the Znak group of deputies in the Sejm since thefifties was banned from the electoral lists for the spring elections.56 In theface of Church calls for a greater role for non-Party Poles in the affairs ofstate, the respected independent who was Chairman of the Front forNational Unity was unceremoniously replaced by a Party leader justbefore the elections, and anti-religious propaganda was stepped up.57 Yet,in the absence of any strong repression of the intelligentsia, all thesemoves became politically incomprehensible: they simply infuriated theintellectuals and the Church, without in the slightest weakening either.The leadership was engaging in futile gestures to soothe the Sovietleadership. In doing so it was preparing the worst possible relationship offorces for itself in June. For the first time since taking office, Gierek waslosing his nerve.The most explosive of all these Soviet ideas for institutional integrationof Poland into the standard East European mould involved amending thePolish Constitution. It was felt necessary to include clauses which boundthe Polish state to eternal friendship with the Soviet Union, and whichlegalized the monopolistic political position of the Communist Party.Such clauses had already been introduced in Bulgaria, Hungary and EastGermany in the early seventies, while Rumania and Czechoslovakia hadlong had them. The Party guideline document for the Seventh Party Congress indicated that the time had come for Poland to follow suit.This produced an extraordinary wave of protest throughout the country.The intelligentsia put its new confidence to the test by giving a lead;the episcopate, partly for general ideological reasons and partly from tactical considerations linked to the need to strengthen its bargaining posi55The merger was announced in the youth movement daily, Sztandar Mlodych, 29 April1976.56Le Monde, 23 February 1976.57The non-Party Professor Janusz Groszkowski, Chairman of the Academy of Sciences,had been elected head of the FNU in June 1971, as a conciliatory gesture by the new Gierekleadership. He was replaced in February 1976 by Head of State Henryk Jablonski. The FNUis a Front embracing the PUWP, the UPP and the Democratic Party, for the purpose ofpresenting a united list in elections.

99

tion on other questions, strongly backed the protests; and tens of thousands of Poles from all walks of life took up their right to consultation byinundating the Sejm and the national press with petitions, open lettersand appeals. In all, an estimated 40,000 people took part in the protestcampaign. All the various contradictions in the political dimension ofGiereks strategy thus came together and exploded in the struggle overamendments to the constitution at the end of 1975. The constitutionalissue was the political counter-point to the market-supply crisis whichhad erupted the previous spring.

June 1976 and its Aftermath

The Party leaderships tactical plan for implementing the price increasesinvolved retaining the most threadbare forms of consultation: they hopedto both avoid any real discussion and claim that the consultationistpromise of Gierek had been maintained. To this end, the rgimeattempted to time the announcement in such a way as to catch the massesoff their guard to the maximum extent. Students were away on holiday,many others were on vacation, and there was no advance notice of an itemon price increases on the Sejm agenda of Thursday 24 June. Followingthe Prime Ministers announcement of the plan on the Thursdayafternoon, there was to be a period of half an hour set aside forconsultations in the factories before work on Friday morning. Themeasures would then come into force on the following Monday morning.The leadership evidently hoped that the local Party machines hadsufficient political skill to manipulate a meeting of workers for half anhour first thing in the morning. But they were proved wrong.It is still not possible to piece together a comprehensive picture of theevents that took place throughout the country on Friday 25 June, threedays before the twentieth anniversary of the Poznan uprising of 1956.58But the main outline of the protest movement in the major centres hasemerged.1. Consultation, Radom style. Events here began with the workers of theWalter Metal Works flooding out of the gates on Friday morning tomobilize workers in other factories for a demonstration. They broughtout the women at the Radoskor Shoe factory, the Radom telephonefactory, the tobacco plant, the meat plant, the Rolling Stock RepairWorks, and others. Here is an eye-witness account of what followed,described by a Radoskor worker.59 At about 10 oclock in the morningwe went out to the meat plant. A procession lined up at ZeromskiegoStreet. Trolleys of meat were driven outside the meat plant to show whata lot of it there was. No one stole any of it. The trolleys went back insideas full as they had come out. At about 11 the procession went downZeromskiego Street, singing the Internationale and the National Anthem.58The most comprehensive coverage of the workers protest movement is contained in theissues of Rouge, the daily paper of the Ligue Communiste Rvolutionnaire in Paris. See the issuesof this paper during the months of July to September. In addition, the following account isbased on documents issued by the Warsaw-based Committee for the Defence of theWorkers, made available by Polish exiles in London.59This account was published in Information Bulletin, No. 1, September 1976, produced inWarsaw by supporters of the Committee for the Defence of the Workers.

100

There were shouts of: No to the price rises. Most of the marchers wereyoung people. The procession was very orderly and peaceful. Everybodywhistled when they passed the Voivodship Office, but no one broke anywindows. Then we came up to the Voivodship Committee of the PolishUnited Workers Party. The building was taken over by workers. Threepeople, including a girl, pulled down the red flag and wiped their shoeswith it. A white-and-red banner (the Polish national flag) was pulled upin its place. At that point, people began singing the National Anthem . . .Negotiations were going on at this time: the demands were to get intouch with the Central Committee and get the price increases withdrawn.An answer was expected in two hours time. At about 2 p.m. the secondshift joined the demonstrators. People were given lifts in cars and tractortrailers. Between 2 and 3 p.m. the workers blocked all road traffic outsidethe Voivodship Committee building, putting cars and buses sidewaysacross the street. When,|after| two hours,|no one came out to talk to thedemonstrators, they began to demolish the building. Windows werebroken, desks, carpets and TV sets were thrown out. A large amount oftinned meat, sausages and pork was brought out of the canteen. Peopleshouted: Look at how these bastards live! It was then that peoplebegan plundering nearby shops. They also set fire to the Committeebuilding. At about 5 p.m. the police came, armed with water canons andgas-throwers. They went in a compact mass from Slowackiego Street inthe direction of the Voivodship Committee. The demonstrators set fire tothe cars that served as a barricade, dispersed to the sides and began toattack the police from the rear. After the demonstration at the Voivodship Committee was dispersed, people began gathering at the VoivodshipOffice. At about 5 p.m. two dead people, covered in blood, were drivenon electric trolleys through the streets of Zeromskiego and Struga. Thepeople clenched their fists and stood fast. According to one report,seventeen workers were killed in the ensuing battles and 30 million zlotyworth of goods were removed from the shops by the demonstrators.60Street fighting continued three hours after the Prime Minister hadannounced on TV that the price increases were withdrawn, and thegovernment became so worried that six plane-loads of troops were dispatched to the town during the night. In the subsequent repression 2,000people were arrested.61 Some were placed in a make-shift barbed-wirecamp on the edge of the town while others were placed in a hurriedlyarranged prison at Bialystok, 300 miles east of Radom on the Sovietborder. Peace, of a kind, was restored.2. Consultation, Ursus style. This town, a few miles outside Warsaw, is builtaround a huge tractor plant employing 15,000 workers. On the Fridaymorning these workers decided to elect a fifteen-man committee todiscuss the price rises with the factory management. It appears, in fact,that the workers line of response was to gain sufficient wage increases tothoroughly offset the effects of the price rise.62 But the factory authoritiesresponded by refusing to talk and instead sacking the fifteen committee60

The figure of seventeen deaths was given by Die Welt; other reports give a figure oftwelve. The authorities claim that both totals are false, but government sources ofinformation have been discredited by the exposure of their attempts to cover up policebrutality during the events entirely.61 Communiqu No. 1, Committee for the Defence of the Workers, 29 September 1976.62 Economist, 10 July 1976.101

members on the spot. At this, the workers drove their tractors to thenearby main Warsaw-Paris railway line and blocked it. When the militiastarted pushing the tractors off the line, the workers responded by rippingup the railway tracks, building defensive barriers and cutting electricpower, thereby holding hostage the international express train to Paris.They refused to release the train till the price rises were cancelled. At thisstage, the police remained in the background. After the Prime MinistersTV announcement cancelling the price rises that evening, some workerswent home triumphant while others celebrated with bonfires around thefactory and along the railway line. Then the police attacked with tear gasand even grenades, beating up anyone in sight and arresting hundreds. Bythe following morning 600 workers had been arrested, and the factorymanagement suspended no less than 1,000 workers from work for threemonths.3. Consultation, Plock style. At this major oil-refining centre some distancenorth of Warsaw, workers at the refinery started discussing the price risesin the early morning. After drawing up a series of demands, theypresented them to the Director as a basis for discussion. The response wasto tell them to get back to work, so the workers poured out of the factoryand marched, about 1,500 strong, singing the Internationale and carryingmakeshift Red Flags, towards the Party headquarters. Meanwhile,workers at the towns agricultural machinery factory, ignorant of whatwas happening at the oil refinery, marched out to the local army barracks.They also sang the Internationale and shouted Army with the nation,Army with the people. Hearing about the other demonstration, theythen joined forces outside the Party headquarters. The demands drawnup earlier at the refinery were presented to the Secretary of the local Partycommittee, who then promised to pass them on to Warsaw. When thenews of the Prime Ministers broadcast reached them, the workersdispersed home. This was just after 8 p.m. Then at about 10 p.m. a curiousincident occurred. About 200 youths went through the town breakingwindows and looting some shops. The police did not stop them or makearrests. Who were they? Where did they come from? There wererumours of police provocation. The next day about 100 workers werearrested; another 150 refinery workers were sacked, along with thirtyfrom the agricultural machinery factory.4. Information from other areas is fragmentary, but strikes occurredthroughout the country. The shipyard workers on the Baltic stoppedwork throughout the day, but no public demonstrations were reported.This pattern was repeated at the famous Zeran car plant on the East bankof the Vistula at Warsaw. At this factory the 15,000 workers, whoproduce the Polski Fiat, refused to work for two days and remained in thefactory holding discussions. Subsequently, fifty-six workers were calledindividually into the managements offices for unspecified consultations,only to find themselves under arrest and on their way to prison. The largeKarol Swiercewski cutlery factory employing 5,000 workers struck, asdid the Tewa transistor factory. The ELTA transformer plant in Lodz drewup a list of demands and handed it in to the Director, forcing him to goforthwith to Warsaw with them by threatening an immediate strike. Theonly important area of the country from which no reports of workstoppages were reported was Silesia, where the highly paid miners appearto have continued working.102

The Party Leaderships Response

There can be no doubt that the strike movement shook the Partyleadership to the core. The events in Radom and Ursus were only themost explosive points in an extraordinarily broad movement across thecountry, and the rgime must have been well aware that continuedintransigence on the price issue would have produced the kind of strongorganizations of working-class strike struggle which presented such amortal threat in 197071. Gierek therefore responded by reversing theresponses which Gomulka had attempted. Instead of first applyingrepression and then being forced into making concessions, the leadershipimmediately granted the workers major demandfor a continuation ofthe freeze on prices. It then attempted to counter-attack by violentlysuppressing the most combative sections of the working class, whileattempting to mobilize a show of support for itself through theorganization of mass rallies in all the major cities.The mass meetings involved little more than Party functionaries andmembers. For example, Die Zeit reported that the Warsaw meeting wasonly about one third as large as the Party leadership claimed, and all thosepresent were carefully screened: they had to wear special identificationtags which were easily recognizable by TV viewers. On 30 June a meetingof over 800 workers, party members and non-party people was reportedto have taken place at Ursus. This is a significant figure, considering thatout of a total work-force at the factory of 15,000, some 2,500 are Partymembers. In other words, the local Party bosses were not able to mobilizeeven half the Party membership at the plant. The content of theresolutions of these meetings was not uniform. Some were in the classicYezhov mould, calling for exemplary punishment of those guilty ofincidents, as Trybuna Ludu reported on 28 June. But one resolution fromBiala Podlaska confined itself to a rather patronizing and back-handedcompliment to the Party leadership, saying its decision to withdraw theprice increases was appreciated and was viewed with due respect, as anexpression of good political judgement.The repressive drive took the form of widespread politically motivateddismissals of those most involved in militant activity in the factories bothbefore and during the June strikes;63 in addition, there were manyhundreds of arrests involving great brutality on the part of the police andprison authorities. Finally, there were a series of trials, some public andsome not, resulting in harsh prison terms for demonstrators in Ursus and63

It is still impossible to quantify accurately the number of political dismissals from work.The Committee for the Defence of the Workers has verified about 2,000, but other estimatesput the total in tens of thousands. An indication of the scope of the victimization is the factthat the Ministry for the engineering industry sent out a general circular to plantmanagements on how to proceed with the dismissals, in a memorandum dated 17 July 1976.The order indicated a number of new criteria for dismissals: The wilful stoppage of workwithout valid reason, the shirking of ones duties, and the disturbance of order and peace inthe institution are a basis for termination of contract without notice, i.e. dismissal fromwork with immediate effect. This memo is contained in Information Bulletin, No. 1, citedabove. In Poland, the right to strike is neither guaranteed by law nor forbidden. However,participation in acts which disrupt the national economy is a legal offence and thisstipulation has been used to victimize workers.103

Radom.64 The Party leadership hoped that in this way it could re-establishits authority and throw the working class on to the defensive, withoutprovoking a full-scale confrontation. This counter-attack continuedthrough July, August and September. But by October it was petering outin the face of a mounting wave of political opposition which was raisingthe political crisis to a higher plane.The working class was not isolated from the dissident culturalintelligentsia and the students as it had been in 197071. Within threedays of the strike movement, open letters and appeals for an end torepression were being produced by various prominent intellectuals. InJune, the forces which had appeared in the meat crisis of Spring 1975 andthe leaders of the wave of protests against Soviet-inspired constitutionalamendments at the beginning of 1976 fused into one front against theParty leadership. After a series of disparate intellectual protests, aCommittee for Defence of the Workers was formed in Warsaw inSeptember to organize support for the victims of the post-Junerepression, to expose the nature of this repression, and to demand therelease of all those in prison or sacked from their jobs. Hundreds ofstudent and other activists involved themselves in the work of thecommittee, distributing its communiqus as an alternative source ofinformation to the censored press and collecting and distributing moneyfor the victimized workers. At the same time, the Church demanded thatthe imprisoned workers be released and gave tacit support to theactivities of the Committee.The authorities were forced to retreat in the face of this movement,releasing many of the jailed workers from Radom and Ursus (though notall), offering institutional concessions to the Church, and claiming thatthe stories of police brutality were anti-Communist inventions. All theimaginative resources of the police were brought to bear on the problemof how to intimidate and harass the members of the Committee: somewere beaten up, others were subjected to death threats and a stream ofanonymous abuse. But throughout November and December theinitiative was passing from the rgime to the Committee, which wascampaigning for a full Sejm inquiry into police brutality during and afterthe June events. A growing number of public figures, many of whom hadno previous record of protest of any kind, signed demands for an officialenquiry into police brutality. In December these protests extended intothe Academy of Sciences and the Party leadership was being thrown ontothe defensive: its attempts to re-establish its authority by means ofrepression were becoming a new source of instability. Even in Radom,where the repression has been most severe, many of the workers torturedby the police have had the confidence to organize protests against theirbrutal treatment.6564

The sentences passed on those brought to trial for participation in the disturbancesranged from three up to ten years. The Polish police evidently used the same methodsagainst those arrested as those used by the prison authorities in Britain against arrested IrishRepublicans: they forced them to run through lines of truncheon-swinging policemenknown in Poland as a health path. One prisoners account of his treatment in Radom waspublished in Information Bulletin, No. 1, cited above.65Sixty-five Radom workers, arrested after the demonstration, joined together to protestagainst police brutality and demand a full enquiry. On the build-up of the campaign in104

The Developing Political Struggle

By Christmas, the Polish economic crisis had deepened, with new foodshortages, mounting debts, growing capitalist pressure for repaymentsand the introduction of sugar and coal rationing. The summers attemptto tackle the economic crisis had produced only a full-scale political crisisand a pledge by the authorities not to carry through the price rises in theforeseeable future. Inside the government, voices were being raised infavour of a return to economic autarky in spite of the general economicdislocation that a sudden end to imports from the capitalist world wouldbring.66 A Soviet loan in December could offer only a very short-termbreathing space. On the political level, the June events had producedbitter hostility to the rgime within the working class, without in any wayweakening the capacity of the masses to engage in political struggle fortheir rights. Instead, a growing political opposition movement is beingformed, currently finding its organizational focus in the Committee forDefence of the Workers. In the leadership of this movement are a numberof political oppositionists with a fund of experience and politicalcredibility stretching back to 1968 and even to 1956.67Five years earlier, during the Baltic crisis, the working class had struggledalone against a Party leadership that could count on the passivity of thestudents and intellectuals, the support of the Church, the neutrality of thepeasants and the vigorous solidarity of Moscow. Now it is the rgimewhich is isolated, able to count only on the Soviet leadership which mustbe increasingly sceptical of Giereks value as its lieutenant in Poland.There is evidence of sharp tensions inside the Party apparatus, andWestern press reports suggest an incipient process of politicaldifferentiation amongst the Party leaders. So far, Giereks hard work overfive years to make himself the master of the bureaucracy has enabled himsuccessfully to hold the apparatus together. But the open political crisis inPoland is still at an early stage of development.From this distance, it is not possible to grasp the shifting configuration offorces in Poland in all its arithmetical detail. Nevertheless, we can drawout some general political conclusions from the previous analysis in thisarticle. In the first place, short of some massive saving operation by theSoviet leadership or the capitalist states of the West, the Polish economiccrisis will deepen, forcing the rgime to attack the living standards of theworking class. At the same time, no socialist could justify such an attacksince it will serve only to maintain in existence the basic cause of theNovember and December, see the detailed account of Helen Jamieson in Red Weekly, 20January 1977. E. Smolar, of the Polish journal Aneks, very kindly provided me with some ofthe material from the opposition in Poland used in this article. A number of statements andappeals by Polish oppositionists, including the Committee for Defence of the Workers, arepublished in the first issue of Labour Focus on Eastern Europe, London, MarchApril 1977.66 See the December 1976 issue of the Polityka Export-Import supplement, which containsa polemic against unspecified circles calling for a return to economic autarky.67 The membership of the Committee comes mainly from two strands within the dissidentintelligentsia, neither of which are necessarily homogeneous politically. First, formermembers of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) like Edward Lipinski, Ludwig Cohn, AntoniPajdak and Aniela Steinsbergowa. Secondly, leading figures from the student movement ofthe sixties, like Jacek Kuron, Antoni Macierewicz, Piotr Naimski and WojciechZiembinski. In addition, some leading figures in Polish cultural life are on the Committee.105

present economic impasse: the stranglehold on economic development

produced by the concentration of political power in the hands of the Partyand state bureaucracy. In an economy whose basic regulative principleinvolves political bargaining over every aspect of productive activity, theexclusion of the direct producers from the political process is a formulafor economic stagnation and waste. The only realistic perspective foreconomic re-stabilization must, therefore, be based on the conquest ofpolitical power by the Polish working class and the establishment ofthoroughgoing socialist democracy.Such a perspective involves a protracted political struggle on the part ofthe working class which clashes with the basic interests of both the Polishand the Soviet State and Party bureaucracies. Historical experience inEastern Europe has repeatedly demonstrated that even moves towardsliberalization which fall far short of genuine democratization provokeextremely sharp resistance on the part of the Soviet leadership, for thevery obvious reason that unlike the capitalist classes of the West its socialposition depends entirely upon its ability to monopolize all aspects ofpolitical life. Furthermore, strategies based upon utilizing the establishedinstitutional framework of political power to achieve democratizationhave been proved bankrupt, for they enable the local leaderships or theSoviet leadership to recoup politically, through their preservation of therepressive apparatus and the political apparatus of the Party, and therebyregain the political initiative and isolate the opposition.At the same time, any independent mass mobilization by the workingclass has a devastating impact upon the authority of these rgimes,forcing them to retreat and producing sharp tensions within thebureaucracy. This was the result of the strike movement in Poland lastJune. Since that time the movement around the Committee forDefence of the Workers has provided an effective means of linking theintellectual opposition with the working class, creating the possibility ofa developing alliance between the two social groups and providing a firstopen platform for rallying forces around political demands on the Partyleadership. The Warsaw Committee has taken up and sought to utilize thecontradictions of Giereks consultationist posture, putting to the testpromises to allow expressions of disagreement with Government policyand demanding an enquiry into actions by the rgime which contradict itscarefully fostered image of harmonious relations with the working class.This policy of independent mobilization of the masses for politicaldemands that hit the rgime at its weakest point creates the worst possiblerelation of forces for the Party leadership: vigorous repression of theCommittee may produce an explosive reaction from the working class,while acceptance of the Committees demands for a full public enquiryinto police brutality can disorganize the repressive forces and stimulatefurther democratic demands. For this reason, the rgime is currentlyattempting to drive a wedge between the working class and theintellectual opposition, in order to prepare the way for suppressing theCommittee and tackling the working class at a later stage.In so far as the growing mass movement is able to force concessions fromthe Party leadership, a growing split will take place within the Polishbureaucracy and between it and the Soviet leadership. Any struggle for106

socialist democracy in Eastern Europe must confront the problem of

armed Soviet intervention to crush the local workers movement.Historical experience indicates some of the crucial factors determiningthe capacity of the Soviet leadership to intervene. Twice in the last thirtyyears, the Soviet leadership has been deterred from military attack andtwice it has felt able to impose its will against insurgent nationalresistance.68 In the case of both Yugoslavia in 19489 and Poland in 1956,the existence of national leaderships with strong popular support and acapacity and preparedness to organize full-scale national resistanceforced the leaders of the CPSU to draw back from military attack. In theYugoslav case, the international relationship of forces was particularlyfavourable for military intervention; but the Tito leadership, emergingfrom a popular revolution whose main form had been a uniquelysuccessful partisan struggle against an invading army, was ready andwilling to inflict terrible costs on a new invader. In the Polish case, thesimultaneous revolutionary process in Hungary and the popularauthority and undoubted determination of Gomulka produced a lastminute hesitation by the Kremlin and a temporary compromise. InHungary, on the other hand, the existence of the weak and divided Nagygovernment could not conceal a real political vacuum, while thecompromise with Gomulka and a simultaneous agreement with Tito hadfreed the Soviet leaderships hand for crushing an isolated Hungarianworking class. In Czechoslovakia in 1968, Moscow calculated correctlythat the Dubcek leadership lacked the political independence to mobilizethe population openly against the invasionthe events in the monthbefore August had graphically illustrated this political weakness withinthe Czechoslovak Party leadership. Yet even with this advantage andwith the relative stability of bureaucratic control in the surroundingstates, the Soviet leadership faced considerable difficulties intransforming a military victory into political restabilization.Today in Poland, the possibility of Soviet military intervention is atopic of serious discussion. The subjugation of Poland is a very muchmore formidable operation than putting down relatively small states likeHungary or Czechoslovakia. Furthermore, the Polish working class hasan unparalleled record of independent political mobilization againstoppression over the last twenty-five years. There are signs of growingpolitical instability also in neighbouring East Germany andCzechoslovakia, while an attack would irreparably damage the Sovietbureaucracys traditional base of support in the labour movements ofWestern Europe. The kind of indecision within the Soviet leadershipwhich accompanied both the Hungarian and Czechoslovakian invasionswould undoubtedly reappear, in conditions where Moscows currentaging leadership team cannot in any case be expected to retain its positions for very much longer.In this situation, the only way to ensure the medium-term development ofthe movement for democratization in Poland must lie through thestrengthening of those factors which can enforce an unacceptably highpolitical price on Soviet intervention. This involves the strengthening of68

The Berlin uprising of 1953 is a special case, for there the established Ulbricht leadershipactively sought Soviet military assistance.107

the independent mobilization and organization of the Polish workers, the

development of links with the anti-bureaucratic movements insurrounding East European states and the development of a strongmovement of solidarity on the part of the labour movements of WesternEurope, involving the Communist Parties in material and politicalsupport for the Polish opposition.For the first time for many decades, the development of the workersmovements in the two halves of Europe can be understood todayincreasingly only within the framework of one single internationalperspective. The fate of the Polish workers struggle during the nextfew years is likely to become as much a direct political factor in the classstruggle in Britain as the outcome of the political crises in Spain orPortugal. Yet an enormous gulf still lies between this increasingly unifiedobjective historical process and the subjective political links between themovements of the working-class vanguards in the two halves of Europe.It is urgently necessary for socialists in Britain to make the problems ofthe Polish workers their own.